Revelation Space

TWENTY

Calvin assumed existence in the lighthugger’s medical suite, still incongruously posed in his enormous hooded chair.

“Where are we?” he asked, rummaging in the corner of one eye with his finger, as if he had just awoken from a satisfactorily deep sleep. “Still around that shithole of a planet?”

“We’ve left Resurgam,” said Pascale, who sat in the seat next to Sylveste, who in turn was reclining on the operation couch, fully clothed and conscious. “We’re on the edge of Delta Pavonis’s heliosphere, near the Cerberus/Hades system. They’ve found the Lorean.”

“Sorry; I think I misheard you.”

“No; you heard me perfectly well. Volyova showed it to us—it’s definitely the same ship.”

Calvin frowned. Like Pascale—like Sylveste—he had assumed that the Lorean was no longer anywhere near the Resurgam system. Not since Alicia and the other mutineers had stolen it to return to Yellowstone back in the early days of the Resurgam colony. “How can it be the Lorean?”

“We don’t know,” Sylveste said. “All we know is what we’ve told you. You’re as much in the dark as the rest of us.” At such a point in their conversation, he normally inserted a barb against Calvin, but for once something made him hold his tongue.

“Is it intact?”

“Something must have attacked it.”

“Survivors?”

“I doubt it. The ship was heavily damaged… whatever it was came suddenly, or they would have tried moving out of range.”

Calvin was silent for a few moments before answering. “Alicia must have died, then. I’m sorry.”

“We don’t know what it was, or how the attack came about,” Sylveste said. “But we may learn something shortly.”

“Volyova’s launched a probe,” Pascale said. “A robot—capable of crossing over to the Lorean very quickly. It should have arrived by now. She said it will enter the ship and find whatever electronic records have survived.”

“And then?”

“We’ll know what killed them.”

“But that won’t be enough, will it? No matter what you learn from the Lorean, it won’t be enough to make you turn back, Dan. I know you better than that.”

“You only think you do,” Sylveste said.

Pascale stood up, coughing. “Can we save this for later? If you can’t work together, Sajaki’s not going to have much use for either of you two.”

“Irrelevant what he thinks about me,” Sylveste said. “Sajaki still has to do whatever I say.”

“He has a point,” Calvin said.

Pascale asked the room to extrude an escritoire, with controls and readouts in the Resurgam style. She made a seat and sat herself beneath the escritoire’s curved ivory fascia. Then she called up a map of the data connections in the suite, and set about establishing the necessary links between Calvin’s module and the suite’s medical systems. She looked like she was spinning an elaborate cat’s cradle in thin air. As the connections were created, Calvin acknowledged them, and told her whether to increase or decrease bandwidth along certain pathways, or whether additional topologies were needed. The procedure lasted only a few minutes, and when it was complete Calvin was able to operate the medical suite’s servo-mechanical equipment, causing a mass of tipped alloy arms to descend from the ceiling, like the sculpture of a medusa.

“You have no idea how this feels,” Calvin said. “It’s the first time in years I’ve been able to act on a part of the physical universe—not since I first repaired your eyes.” And as he spoke, the multi-jointed arms executed a shimmering dance, blades, lasers, claws, molecular-manipulators and sensors scything the air in a whirl of vicious silver.

“Very impressive,” Sylveste said, feeling the breeze on his face. “Just be careful.”

“I could rebuild your eyes in a day,” Calvin said. “I could make them better than they ever were. I could make them look human—hell; with the technology here I could implant biological eyes just as easily.”

“I don’t want you to rebuild them,” Sylveste said. “Right now they’re all I have on Sajaki. Just repair Falkender’s work.”

“Ah, yes—I’d forgotten about that.” Calvin, who remained essentially immobile, raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure this procedure is wise?”

“Just be careful what you poke.”

Alicia Keller Sylveste had been his last wife before Pascale. They had married on Yellowstone, during the long years when the Resurgam expedition had been planned in excruciating detail. They had been together at the founding of Cuvier and had worked in harmony during the earliest years of the digs. She had been brilliant; too much so, perhaps, to stay comfortably within his orbit. Independently minded, she had begun to draw away from him—both personally and professionally—as their time on Resurgam entered its third decade. Alicia was not alone in her conviction that enough had been learned of the Amarantin; that it was time for the expedition—never meant to be permanent—to return to Epsilon Eridani. After all, if they had not learned anything shattering in thirty years, there was no promise that the next thirty years, or the next century, would bring anything more overwhelming. Alicia and her sympathisers believed that the Amarantin did not merit further detailed study; that the Event had only been an unfortunate accident of no actual cosmic significance. It was not hard to see the sense in this. The Amarantin, after all, were not the only dead species known to humankind. Out in the ever-expanding bubble of explored space, it was entirely possible that other cultures were about to be discovered, potent with archaeological treasures waiting to be unearthed. Alicia’s faction felt that Resurgam should be abandoned; that the colony’s finest minds should return to Yellowstone and select new targets of study.

Sylveste’s faction, of course, disagreed in the strongest terms. By then Alicia and Sylveste were estranged, but even in the depths of their enmity they preserved a cool respect of each other’s abilities. If love had withered, detached admiration remained.

Then came the mutiny. Alicia’s faction had done just what they always threatened to do: abandoned Resurgam. Unable to convince the rest of the colony to travel with them, they had stolen the Lorean from its parking orbit. The mutiny had been quite bloodless, but in their theft of the ship, Alicia’s faction had inflicted a much more insidious harm upon the colony. The Lorean had contained all the intra-system vessels and shuttles, meaning that the colonists were confined to Resurgam’s surface. They had no means to repair or upgrade the comsat girdle until Remilliod’s arrival, decades later. Servitors, replicating technology and implants had all been in excruciatingly short supply after Alicia’s departure.

But, in fact, Sylveste’s faction had been the fortunate ones.

“Log entry,” said Alicia’s ghost, floating disembodied in the bridge. “Twenty-five days out from Resurgam. We’ve decided—against my better judgement—to approach the neutron star on our way out. The alignment’s propitious; it doesn’t take us very far from our planned heading for Eridani, and the net delay to our journey will be tiny compared with the years of flight that are ahead of us in any case.”

She was not quite what Sylveste remembered. It had been a long time, in any case. She no longer seemed hateful to him; merely errant. She wore dark green clothes of a kind no one had worn in Cuvier since the mutiny itself, and her hairstyle seemed almost theatrical in its antiquity.

“Dan was convinced there was something important out here, but the evidence was always lacking.”

That surprised him. She was speaking from a time long before the unearthing of the obelisk with its curious orrery-like inscriptions. Had his obsession been that strong, even then? It was entirely possible, but the realisation was not a comfortable one. Alicia was right in what she said. The evidence had been lacking.

“We saw something strange,” Alicia said. “A cometary impact on Cerberus, the planet orbiting the neutron star. Such impacts must be quite rare, this far out from the main Kuiper swarm. It naturally drew our attention. But when we were close enough to examine the surface of Cerberus, there was no sign of a new impact crater.”

Sylveste felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle. “And?” he found himself mouthing, almost silently, as if Alicia were standing before them in the bridge, and not a projection dredged from the memory banks of the wrecked ship.

“It was not something we could ignore,” she said. “Even if it seemed to lend tacit support to Dan’s theory that there was something strange about the Hades/Cerberus system. So we altered our course to come in closer.” She paused. “If we find something significant… something we can’t explain… I don’t think we’ll have any ethical choice but to inform Cuvier. Otherwise we could never again hold our heads high as scientists. We will know better tomorrow, anyway. We’ll be within probe range by then.”

“How much more of this is there?” Sylveste asked Volyova. “How much longer did she continue with log entries?”

“About a day,” Volyova said.

Now they were in the spider-room, safe—or so Volyova wished to believe—from the prying eyes of Sajaki and the others. They had still not listened to everything Alicia had to say, for the very act of sifting through the spoken records was time-consuming and emotionally draining. Yet the basic shape of the truth was emerging, and it was far from encouraging. Alicia’s crew had been attacked by something near Cerberus, suddenly and decisively. Shortly Volyova and her crewmates would know a great deal more about the danger they were being impelled towards.

“You realise,” Volyova said, “that if we encounter trouble, you may have to enter the gunnery.”

“I don’t think that would necessarily be for the best,” Khouri said. Justifying herself, she added, “We both know there have been some worrying events related to the gunnery recently.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact… during my convalescence, I convinced myself that you know more than you admit.” Volyova relaxed back into the maroon plush of her seat, toying with the brass controls in front of her. “I think you told me the truth when you said you were an infiltrator. But I think that was as far as it went. The rest was a lie, designed to satisfy my curiosity and yet stop me taking the matter to the rest of the Triumvirate… which worked, of course. But there were too many things you didn’t explain to my satisfaction. Take the cache-weapon, for instance. When it malfunctioned, why did it point itself at Resurgam?”

“It was the closest target.”

“Sorry; too glib. It was something about Resurgam, wasn’t it? And the fact that you infiltrated this ship only when you knew our destination… yes; an out-of-the-way place would have made a good venue for staging an attempted take-over of the cache—but that was never on the cards anyway. You may have been resourceful, Khouri, but there was no way you were ever going to wrest control of those weapons from either myself or the rest of the Triumvirate.” She put her hand beneath her chin now. “So—the obvious question. If your initial story was untrue, what exactly are you doing aboard this ship?” She looked at Khouri, awaiting an answer. “You may as well tell me now, because I swear the next person to ask you will be Sajaki. It can’t have escaped your notice that Sajaki has his suspicions, Khouri—especially since Kjarval and Sudjic died.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with…” Then her voice lost conviction. “Sudjic had her own vendetta against you; that was none of my doing.”

“But I had already disabled your suit’s weapons. Only I could have undone that order, and I was too busy being killed to do so. How did you manage to override the lock in order to kill Sudjic?”

“Someone else did it.” Khouri paused before continuing. “Something else, I should say. It was the same something that got into Kjarval’s suit and made her turn against me in the training session.”

“That wasn’t Kjarval’s doing?”

“No… not really. I don’t think I was her favourite person in the universe… but I’m fairly sure that she wasn’t planning to kill me in the training chamber.”

This was a lot to take in, even if it did finally feel like the truth. “So what happened, exactly?”

“The thing inside my suit had to arrange matters so I’d be on the team to recover Sylveste. Getting Kjarval out of the picture was the only option.”

Yes; she could almost see the logic in that. She had never once questioned the manner in which Kjarval had died. It had seemed so predictable that one of the crew would turn against Khouri—especially Kjarval or Sudjic. Equally, one or other would surely have turned against Volyova before too long. Both things had happened, but now she saw them as part of something else… ripples of something she did not pretend to understand, but which moved with sharklike stealth beneath the surface of events.

“What was so important about being in on the Sylveste recovery?”

“I…” Khouri had been on the verge of saying something, but now she faltered. “I’m not sure this is the best time, Ilia—not when we’re so close to whatever destroyed the Lorean.”

“I didn’t bring you here just to admire the view, in case you thought otherwise. Remember what I said about Sajaki? It’s either me, now—the closest thing on this ship you have to either an ally or a friend—or it’s Sajaki, later, with some hardware you probably don’t want to even think about.” That was no great exaggeration, either. Sajaki’s trawl techniques were not exactly state-of-the-art in their subtlety.

“I’ll start at the beginning, then.” What Volyova had just said seemed to have done the trick. That was good—or else she would have to think about dusting off her own coercion methods. “The part about being a soldier… all that was true. How I got to Yellowstone is… complicated. Even now I’m not sure how much of it was an accident; how much of it was her doing. All I know is, she singled me out early on for this mission.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t really know. Someone with a lot of power in Chasm City; maybe the whole planet. She called herself the Mademoiselle. She was careful never to use a real name.”

“Describe her. She may be someone we know; someone we’ve had dealings with in the past.”

“I doubt it. She wasn’t…” Khouri paused. “She wasn’t one of you. Maybe once, but not now. I got the impression she’d been in Chasm City for a long time. But it wasn’t until after the Melding Plague that she came to power.”

“She came to power and I haven’t heard of her?”

“That was the whole point of her power. It wasn’t blatant, and she didn’t have to make her presence known to get something done. She just made shit happen. She wasn’t even rich—but she controlled more resources than anyone else on the planet, by sleight of hand. Not enough to conjure up a ship, though—which is why she needed you.”

Volyova nodded. “You said she might have been one of us, once. What did you mean by that?”

Khouri hesitated. “It wasn’t anything obvious. But the man working for her—Manoukhian, he called himself—definitely used to be an Ultra. He dropped enough clues to suggest that he’d found her in space.”

“Found—as in rescued?”

“That was how it sounded to me. She had these jagged metal sculptures, too—at least I thought they were sculptures to start with. Later, they began to look like parts of a wrecked spaceship. Like she was keeping them around her as a reminder of something.”

Something tugged at Volyova’s memory, but for the moment she allowed the thought process to remain below the level of consciousness. “Did you get a good look at her?”

“No. I saw a projection, but it needn’t have been accurate. She lived inside a palanquin, like the other hermetics.”

Volyova knew a little about the hermetics. “She needn’t have been one at all. A palanquin could simply have been a way of masking her identity. If we knew more about her origin… Did this Manoukhian tell you anything else?”

“No; he wanted to—I could tell that much—but he managed not to give anything useful anyway.”

Volyova leaned closer. “Why do you say he wanted to tell you?”

“Because that was his style. The guy never stopped mouthing off. The whole time I was being driven around by him, he never stopped telling me stories about all the things he’d done; all the famous people he’d known. Except for anything to do with the Mademoiselle. That was a closed subject; maybe because he was still working for her. But you could tell he was just itching to tell me stuff.”

Volyova drummed her fingers on the fascia. “Maybe he found a way.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No; I wouldn’t expect you to. It was nothing he told you, either… but I think he did find a way to tell you the truth.” The memory process she had suppressed a moment earlier had indeed dredged something. She thought back to the time of Khouri’s recruitment; to the examination she had given the woman after she had been brought aboard. “I can’t be sure yet, of course…”

Khouri looked at her. “You found something on me, didn’t you? Something Manoukhian planted?”

“Yes. It seemed quite innocent, at first. Fortunately, I have an odd character defect, common amongst those of us who indulge in the sciences… I never, ever throw anything away.” It was true; disposing of the thing she had found would have demanded a greater expenditure of effort than simply leaving it in her lab. It had seemed pointless at the time—the thing was just a shard, after all—but now she could run a compositional analysis on the metal splinter she had pulled from Khouri. “If I’m right, and this was Manoukhian’s doing, it may tell us something about the Mademoiselle. Perhaps even her identity. But you still need to tell me what exactly she wanted you to do for her. We already know it involves Sylveste in some way or another.”

Khouri nodded. “It does. And I’m afraid this is the part you’re really not going to like.”

“We’ve completed a more detailed inspection of the surface of Cerberus from our present orbit,” Alicia’s projection said. “And there’s still no evidence of the cometary impact point. Plenty of cratering, yes—but none of it recent. Which just doesn’t make any sense.” She elaborated the one plausible theory they had, which was that the comet had been destroyed just before impact. Even that explanation implied the use of some form of defensive technology, but at least it avoided the paradox of the unchanged surface features. “But we saw no sign of anything like that, and there’s certainly no evidence of any technological structures on the surface. We’ve decided to launch a squadron of probes down to the surface. They’ll be able to hunt for anything we might have missed—-machines buried in caves, or sunk in canyons below our viewing angle—and they might provoke some kind of response, if there are automated systems down there.”

Yes, Sylveste thought acidly. They had indeed provoked some kind of response. But it was almost certainly not the kind Alicia had anticipated.

Volyova located the next segment in Alicia’s narrative. The probes had been deployed; tiny automated spacecraft as fragile and nimble as dragonflies. They had fallen towards the surface of Cerberus—there was no atmosphere to retard them—only arresting their descent at the last moment, with quick spurts of fusion flame. For a while, seen from the vantage point of the Lorean, they had been sparks of brightness against the unremitting grey of Cerberus. But as the sparks had become tiny, they were a reminder that even this tiny, dead world was orders of magnitude larger than most human creations.

“Log entry,” said Alicia, after a gap in the narrative. “The probes are reporting something unusual—-it’s just coming in now.” She looked to one side, consulting a display beyond the projection volume. “Seismic activity on the surface. We were expecting to see it already, but until now the crust hasn’t moved at all, even though the planet’s orbit isn’t quite circularised and there should be tidal stresses. It’s almost as if the probes have triggered it, but that’s quite ridiculous.”

“No more so than a planet that erases all evidence of a cometary impact on its surface,” Pascale said. Then she looked at Sylveste. “I didn’t mean that as a criticism of Alicia, by the way.”

“Perhaps you didn’t,” he said. “But it would have been valid.” Then he turned to Volyova. “Did you recover anything other than Alicia’s log entries? There must have been telemetered data from her probes…”

“We have it,” Volyova said cautiously. “I haven’t cleaned it up. It’s a little on the raw side.”

“Patch me in.”

Volyova breathed a string of commands into the bracelet she always wore and the bridge burned away, a barrage of synaesthesia jumbling Sylveste’s senses. He was being immersed in the data from one of Alicia’s probes—the surveyor’s sensorium fully as raw as Volyova had warned. But Sylveste had known more or less what to expect; the transition was merely jarring rather than—as could easily have been the case—agonising.

He floated above a landscape. Altitude was difficult to judge, since the fractal surface features—craters, clefts and rivers of frozen grey lava—would have looked very similar at any distance. But the surveyor told it he was only half a kilometre above Cerberus. He looked down at the plain, hunting for some sign of the seismic activity Alicia had mentioned. Cerberus looked eternally old and unchanging, as if nothing had happened to it for billions of years. The only hint of motion came from the fusion jets, casting radial shadows away from his position as the machine loitered.

What had the drones seen? Certainly nothing in the visual band. Feeling his way into the sensorium—it was like slipping on an unfamiliar glove—Sylveste found the neural commands which accessed different data channels. He turned to thermal sensors, but the plain’s temperature showed no signs of variation. Across the complete EM spectrum there was nothing anomalous. Neutrino and exotic particle fluxes remained steadfastly within expectation. Yet when he switched to the gravitational imagers, he knew that something was very wrong with Cerberus. His visual field was overlaid with coloured, translucent contours of gravitational force. The contours were moving.

Things—huge enough to register via the mass sensors—were travelling underground, converging in a pincer movement directly below the point where he was hovering. For a moment, he allowed himself to believe that these moving forms were only vast, buried flows of lava—but that comforting delusion lasted no more than a second.

This was nothing natural.

Lines appeared on the plain, forming a starlike mandala centred on the same focus. Dimly, on the limits of his perception, he was aware that similar starlike patterns were opening below the other probes. The cracks widened, opening into monstrous black fissures. Through the fissures, Sylveste had a glimpse into what seemed to be kilometres of luminous depth. Coiled mechanical shapes writhed, sliding blue-grey tendrils wider than canyons. The motion was busy; orchestrated, purposeful, machinelike. He felt a special kind of revulsion. It was the feeling of biting an apple and exposing a colony of wrigglingly industrious maggots. He knew now. Cerberus was not a planet.

It was a mechanism.

Then the coiled things erupted through the star-shaped hole in the plain, rushing dreamily towards him, as if reaching to snatch him out of the sky. There was a horrible moment of whiteness—a whiteness in every sense he had—before Volyova’s sensorium-feed ended with screaming suddenness, Sylveste almost shrieking with existential shock as his sense of self crashed back into his body in the bridge.

He had time enough, after he had gathered his faculties, to observe Alicia mouthing something soundlessly, her face carved in what might have been fear, and what might equally have been the dismay at learning—in the instant prior to her death—that she had been wrong all along.

Then her image dissolved into static.

“Now at least we know he’s mad,” Khouri said, hours later. “If that didn’t persuade him against going any closer to Cerberus, I don’t think anything will.”

“It may well have had the opposite effect,” Volyova said, voice low despite the relative security furnished by the spider-room. “Now Sylveste knows there is something worth investigating, rather than merely suspecting so.”

“Alien machinery?”

“Evidently. And perhaps we can even guess at the purpose, too. Cerberus clearly isn’t a real world. At the very least, it’s a real world surrounded by a shell of machines, with an artificial crust. That explains why the cometary impact-point was never found—the crust, presumably, repaired itself before Alicia’s crew could get close enough.”

“Some kind of camouflage?”

“So it would seem.”

“So why draw attention by attacking those probes?”

Volyova had evidently given the matter some prior thought. “The illusion of verisimilitude obviously can’t be foolproof at distances less than a kilometre or so. My guess is the probes were about to learn the truth just before they were destroyed, so the world lost nothing and gained some additional raw material in the bargain.”

“Why, though? Why surround a planet with a false crust?”

“I have no idea, and neither, I suspect, does Sylveste. That’s why he’s now even more likely to insist on going closer.” She lowered her voice. “He’s already asked me to devise a strategy, in fact.”

“A strategy for what?”

“For getting him inside Cerberus.” She paused. “He knows about the cache-weapons, of course. He presumes they’ll be sufficient to achieve his aims, by weakening the crustal machinery in one area of the planet. More than that will be needed, of course…” Her tone of voice shifted. “Do you think this Mademoiselle of yours always knew this would be his objective?”

“She was pretty damn clear he shouldn’t be allowed aboard the ship.”

“The Mademoiselle told you that before you joined us?”

“No; afterwards.” She told Volyova about the implant in her head; how the Mademoiselle had downloaded an aspect of herself into Khouri’s skull for the purposes of the mission. “She was a pain,” she said. “But she made me immune to your loyalty therapies, which I suppose was something to be grateful for.”

“The therapies worked as intended,” Volyova said.

“No, I just pretended. The Mademoiselle told me what to say and when, and I guess she didn’t do too bad a job, or else we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

“She can’t rule out the possibility that the therapies worked partially, can she?”

Khouri shrugged again. “Does it matter? What kind of loyalty would make any sense now? You’ve as good as told me you’re waiting for Sajaki to make the wrong move. The only thing holding this crew together is Sylveste’s threat to kill us all if we don’t do what he wants. Sajaki’s a megalomaniac—maybe he should have double-checked the therapies he was running on you.”

“You resisted Sudjic when she tried to kill me.”

“Yeah, I did. But if she’d told me she was going after Sajaki—or even that prick Hegazi—I don’t know what I would have said.”

Volyova spent a moment in consultation with herself.

“All right,” she said finally. “I suppose the loyalty issue is moot. What else did the implant do for you?”

“When you hooked me into the weapons,” Khouri said, “she used the interface to inject herself—or a copy of herself—into the gunnery. To begin with I think she just wanted to assume control of as much of the ship as possible, and the gunnery was her only point of entry.”

“The architecture wouldn’t have allowed her to reach beyond it.”

“It didn’t. To the best of my knowledge, she never gained control of any part of the ship other than the weapons.”

“You mean the cache?”

“She was controlling the rogue weapon, Ilia. I couldn’t tell you at the time, but I knew what was happening. She wanted to use the weapon to kill Sylveste at long-range, before we’d ever arrived at Resurgam.”

“I suppose,” Volyova said, heavy with resignation, “that it makes a kind of twisted sense. But to use that weapon just to kill a man… I told you, you’re going to have to tell me why she wanted him dead so badly.”

“You won’t like it. Especially not now, with what Sylveste wants to do.”

“Just tell me.”

“I will, I will,” Khouri said. “But there’s one other thing—one other complicating factor. It’s called Sun Stealer, and I think you may already be acquainted with it.”

Volyova looked as if some recently healed internal injury had just relapsed; as if some painful seam had opened in her like ripping cloth.

“Ah,” she said eventually. “That name again.”